Utah lawmaker and U.S. Senate candidate Mike Kennedy made national headlines last month at the state Republican Party Convention when he won a majority of delegate votes and forced former presidential nominee Mitt Romney into a primary election.

Kennedy finished with 51 percent of the convention vote, besting Romney's 49 percent and giving himself a shot to emerge with the party's nomination in the race to replace the retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch.

But winning a majority of the vote among the party's 4,000 delegates is very different than winning votes from GOP voters statewide, and now with a little more than a month to go before the June 26 primary, Kennedy is working to raise his profile by traveling the state.

"I never like to toot my own horn, but that's kind of what you have to do to do this," Kennedy said in an interview ahead of meet-the-candidate events in Cedar City and St. George on Saturday.

Underdog status against Romney

A family practice doctor with a law degree who lives in Alpine, Kennedy has been a member of the Utah House of Representatives since 2013.

That leaves him little-known compared to Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and current Holladay resident who has been a popular figure in the Beehive State since his work with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.

As a presidential candidate in 2012, he won 73 percent of the vote in the state.

Although Kennedy beat Romney at the convention, recent evidence suggests that winning over delegates is not the same as winning over GOP voters statewide.

Gov. Gary Herbert was handily defeated at the 2016 convention by challenger Jonathan Johnson, who had 55 percent of the delegate vote. In the June primary, however, Herbert won easily, securing 73 percent of the vote to secure the GOP nomination.

A similar theme played out in a 2017 special election to replace Jason Chaffetz when he resigned from Utah House District 3. Former Provo Mayor John Curtis won the primary against former state lawmaker Christopher Herrod by more than 10 percent, despite Herrod having won the most votes at convention. This year Curtis, now the incumbent, again faces Herrod in another primary.

Who is Mike Kennedy?

Kennedy, 49, said he is trying to run a positive campaign, eschewing attacks on Romney and instead touting himself as an overachiever and dedicated conservative who could appeal to voters disenchanted with "establishment" candidates.

The product of a single-parent home that struggled with poverty, Kennedy said he worked hard as a young man, serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then working his way through medical school and law school before building a thriving family medical practice in Lindon. He ran for office in 2012, winning the House District 27 seat and representing Alpine, Highland and Cedar Hills. He is a father of eight.

Kennedy said his top priority as a senator would be to reduce the deficit, vowing to vote against omnibus spending bills or last-minute stopgap spending measures he wasn't given enough tim to read.

"A rising deficit would be our greatest national security threat," he said.

Kennedy said — as has Romney — that he would have voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the tax-cut legislation Republicans passed at the end of last yearand argued that as a doctor he thinks state legislatures should be given more control over health-care programs.